“Viola!”
If there was an answering cry, it was lost in the tumult.
All of a sudden, the pressure around her relented, as if a cork had been released. She gasped, sucking air into her lungs, shaking her head in an attempt to clear it. The fog without seemed mirrored by another fog, growing within her mind.
A pilaster loomed into view through the gloom ahead. She clung to it, recognized a bas-relief: and suddenly knew where she was. The door to the Hall of the Chariots was just up ahead. If they could just get through it and away from the infernal fog…
She flattened herself against the wall, then felt her way along it, keeping out of the panicked crowd, until she could make out the door ahead. People were squeezing through, fighting and clawing, ripping at one another’s clothes, forming a bloody bottleneck of insanity and panic. More grotesque, deep groaning from the hidden speakers, along with an intensification of the bansheelike wail. Under this assault of noise, Nora felt a sudden vertigo, as if she were sinking; the kind of awful swoon she sometimes experienced in the throes of a fever. She staggered, fought to keep her feet: to fall now might mean the end.
She heard a cry and saw, through the swirling mist, a woman nearby, lying on one side, being trampled by the crowd. Instinctively, she bent forward, grabbed an upraised hand, and hauled her to her feet. The woman’s face was bloody, one leg crooked and obviously broken—but she was still alive.
“My leg,” the woman groaned.
“Put your arm around my shoulder!” Nora yelled.
She forced herself into the stream of people and the two were borne along through the doorway into the Hall of the Chariots. A dreadful, growing pressure… and then suddenly there was space, people milling about, disoriented, their clothes torn and bloody, weeping, shrieking for help. The woman sagged on her shoulder like a dead weight, whimpering. At least here they would be rid of the murderous barrage…
And yet, strangely, they were not. She had not escaped the sound, or the fog, or the strobe lights. Nora looked around, disbelieving. The fog was still rising fast, and more lights flashed from the ceiling—relentless, blinding bursts that each seemed to cloud her brain a little further.
Viola’s right, she thought in a vague, confused way. This was no malfunction. The script didn’t call for strobes or fog in the Hall of the Chariots; only in the burial chamber itself.
This was something planned—deliberate.
She clutched her throbbing head with one hand, urging the woman along, plodding slowly forward toward the God’s Second Passage and the tomb exit that lay beyond. But once again, a seething mass blocked the narrow door at the far end.
“One at a time!” Nora screamed.
Directly ahead of her, a man was trying to beat his way through the crowd. With her free arm, she seized him by his tuxedo collar, yanking him off balance. He looked around wildly, took a swing at her.
“Bitch!” he yelled. “I’ll kill you!”
Nora backed off in horror and the man turned back, grabbing and tearing at the people before him. But it wasn’t just him: all around, people were screaming, boiling with rage, eyes rolling in their sockets—utter bedlam, a Boschean vision of hell.
She felt it even within herself: overwhelming agitation; a muddy, unfocused fury; an impending sense of doom. Yet nothing had actually happened. There was no fire, no mass murder—nothing to justify this kind of mass insanity…
Nora spotted the museum’s director, Frederick Watson Collopy. His face looked shattered and he was staggering forward toward the doorway, one dead-looking leg trailing behind him: Draaaag-thump! Draaaag-thump!
He spied her and his ravaged face grew bright and hungry. He staggered toward her through the crush. “Nora! Help me!”
He seized the injured woman. Nora was about to thank him for his help, when he tossed her roughly to the ground.
Nora looked at him in horror. “What the hell are you doing?” She stepped forward to help the woman but Collopy seized her with incredible force, his hands clawing and grasping at her like a drowning man. She tried to twist free, but his desperate strength was shocking. In his frenzy, he twisted one arm around her neck.
“Help me!” he screamed again. “I can’t walk!”
Nora jabbed him in the solar plexus with her elbow and he staggered, but still clung to her.
There was a sudden flash by her side and Nora saw Viola, kicking Collopy fiercely in the shins. With a shriek, Collopy released his grip and collapsed to the floor, writhing and spitting curses.
Nora grabbed Viola and together they backed away from the writhing crowd, staggered toward the rear wall of the Hall of the Chariots. There was a crash and the sound of shattering glass as a display case toppled over.